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Category: Linguistics
What are the negative and positive politeness strategies?
Politeness theory I’m sure I’ve answered this here already. Positive politeness strategies are culturally approved ways of interacting with other people, that involve doing good things for them. They concentrate on eliminating distance between people. Negative politeness strategies are culturally approved ways of interacting with other people, that involve not doing bad things to them. […]
What does Roman Jakobson mean about poetry: “the projection of the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection to the axis of combination”?
I understood the words and the phrases, but I had to be edified by some online links, and I’ve got an advantage in that I know why Jakobson said it the way he did. Roman Jakobson Metaphor Project Jacobson – Metaphor and Metonomy Exec summary: there is one takeaway message for poets: FORM MATTERS The […]
What language do people in Cyprus speak?
Eutychius Kaimakkamis’ is the most complete answer; I’ll only add: The status of Standard Greek vs Cypriot Greek is a diglossia, and it’s a much more clear-cut instance of diglossia than what was going on in Greece in the 20th century. Cypriot Turkish (Cypriot Turkish, Kıbrıslıca) has some clear typological affinities with Cypriot Greek. For […]
What languages are spoken in Vanuatu?
Ethnologue lists 113 languages for Vanuatu, two extinct: Vanuatu Vanuatu has the highest language density of any country on the planet: one language per 2,000 people. When last I checked, Vanuatu was also the last frontier for a large number of undocumented or underdocumented languages. Ethnologue is compiled by SIL International, which coordinates missionary linguists. […]
When reading Koine Greek, do I need to pronounce the accents? And if I do, how do I pronounce them?
Do you want practicality, or do you want historical accuracy? Historical accuracy first. I’ve check Philomena Probert’s Ancient Greek Accentuation, and Vox Graeca. We know that the switch to stress accent must have happened by Gregory of Nazianzus (4th century): his poetry uses stress and not pitch accent as a base. We suspect that the […]
Why are most old foreign words still used, despite its semantic void can already be considered filled/supplied by its own words?
Remember: language always has a social context. Always. Why do languages borrow words and phrases? Sometimes: consciously, to fill in a gap in the language, by bilinguals who care about the target language. That takes work. Rather more often: as a transferral of prestige and connotations from the source language, by bilinguals who want to […]
Why is the French “U” different from the other Latin languages?
Mildred Pope, From Latin to Modern French, 1934. A very good book. Early on in the history of French, every instance of /u/ changed to /y/; and very soon after, every instance of closed /o/ changed to /u/, as a pull-chain (of the kind that happens a lot with vowels). It’s not as early on […]
If all indo european languages come from one language, does that mean that it used to be one people who spoke that language?
Probably, but not necessarily. As the astute Joachim Pense put it (answering this question, rather than the OP’s question): Joachim Pense’s answer to Linguists believe Proto indo European is the root of all those European languages. Does this mean that at one time everyone spoke the same language? No. Proto-Indo-European is a reconstruction that has […]
What are the two most studied foreign languages in your country? (excluding English)?
To my amusement, when I googled for this in Australia, I found that I know the researchers that came up with the latest research on this. The latest research I found was 10 years ago, though (which is why I know them); and I don’t think the numbers will have stayed the same. http://research.acer.edu.au/cgi/… As […]
What languages did people in Anatolia/Turkey speak prior to the arrival of the Seljuk Turks?
Originally Answered: Which languages were spoken in Anatolia and modern Turkey when Turkic arrived? I’m touched by Anon’s A2A’ing assumption of my omniscience, but I’m going to Wikipedia here, to confirm my vague hunch that the Anatolian languages of yore were long, long gone by the time the Seljuks came to town. Anatolian languages and […]